A Parting Shot

It’s looking as though my class this Thursday will be my last. No, not for the term, but for life.

Which raises the prospect of giving the proverbial “last lecture” in my “Writing for the Media” class.

I’m inclined to not let my students know that on Thursday I will have run a far longer course than the one they have been enrolled in.

Still, looking back over the years I’ve taught, I wonder just how many classes I’ve presided over since my earliest classroom assignment in western Kenya, not far from Barack Obama’s father’s village. I was in the first Peace Corps teaching program in Kenya back in 1965. The East African country was itself a mere two years old.

My math tells me I've been 45 years, on and off, between classroom and newsroom. I've literally taught thousands of classes.

Could it be?

I wish they kept “teaching stats” the way they do with baseball. I wonder what my lifetime “earned teaching average” was. Or my “strike outs” per times at the lectern. I can remember a few grand slams. A smattering of doubles. I may have stolen a base or two in my heyday. And, alas, I've had my slumps and my errors.

The demise of journalism in recent years and the on-line information diets of my students have kept me nimble. In today’s class, not a single student could name Oregon’s two U.S. senators. How strange it must seemed to them that I even thought the information was important for them to know.

I don’t know why I should say anything different on Thursday than I’ve been saying in recent years. The students in this class have no reason to see Thursday’s class as having any particular significance. No more than the names of Oregon’s two senators.

In truth, I won’t really be ending my teaching. I’ve learned to teach both in and out of class. That comes with being a journalist. I concluded some time ago that journalists are teachers. If anything, reader-students are more demanding than those in the classroom. That’s probably because journalists have to anticipate reader demands. They aren’t staring us in the face. There are no hands raised to be called on.

So I’ll continue to write — and hence teach.

I’ve enjoyed classroom teaching. I like the give and take. The theater. The stage. Reading faces for signs of learning or evidence of uncertainty or an opening for a laugh together. I’ve stayed in touch with quite a few of my students. Amazingly, some of them are retiring themselves. In my early days, when I was teaching journalism at Berkeley, I was only four or five years older than my students. It’s hard to imagine that I had anything worthwhile to share.

Now, if anything, I’m overwhelmed by my experiences. I want to share the satisfaction of accomplishment and the lessons of mistakes. I’ve had my share of both. So will my students. They shouldn’t let either get the better of them. They should learn from them all.

And that, friends, sounds like the makings of — if not a last lecture — a parting shot.

Outta Sitemeter

One of the wonders of blogging is having a sitemeter. The "visits" and "views" tracker tells you a lot. Some of it is more than you want to know.

But the “Referrals” feature offers intriguing information. Most folks just visit the site because they know it and want to see whether I still have a pulse.

But a few, it would seem, come here seeking kinky thrills. The best evidence of the intent is a post that I titled “Sonic Sex on a Sweat Towel.” There must be a whole community out there interested in “Sex on a Sweat Towel” because those words suck in an inordinately large readership.

The post isn’t even tagged with “sex,” which is usually good bet for a few dozen visits. The content is about what happens to the wires on my iPod and its headset when I throw them into my backpack on my sweat towel.

I speculate in the post that some audio intimacy takes place in the dark resulting in obscene tangling of the cords.

The actual tags are innocuous: “iPod” and “Steve Jobs.”

Among the other favored referral sites is the famous “Sarah Palin’s Glasses,” which at the time it was posted drew a record number of strangers to The Red Electric. Now, months later, it seems the fascination with the good governor (and her specs and her weird family values) is endless.

Another enticing post is “PCC lockdown,” which isn’t about a particular lockdown (alas there have been a few) but about the bureaucratic memo the PCC administration circulated to tell PCC students and faculty what to do in an “active shooter” situation.

The short answer: Lock the doors, pull down the shades, stop taking notes, and hide.

Posting this little ditty has meant that every time there’s a PCC lockdown (there was one today), Google sends anxious readers to The Red Electric and my parsing of bureaucratic prose.

Clearly I am not meeting news expectations, which explains why the sitemeter tells me that Red Electric visits are brief — a mere 41 seconds.

Then again, if you stare at a sweep second hand, a 41-second interval isn’t all that brief, especially when the topic is Sarah Palin’s glasses or Sex on a Sweat Towel. Web surfers seeking such subjects must be slow readers.

It figures.